Description
Book SynopsisGeorge Green is a pop-culture Juvenal, whose satiric strain is both trenchant and elegiac. The poems in
Lord Byron’s Foot move deftly between the back alleys of Trieste and the parking lots of his hometown in Pennsylvania, between Chichester Cathedral and the downtown streets and parks of Manhattan where he has lived for three decades. Green’s range and depth of knowledge in these technically accomplished poems might be intimidating if not for the disarming delight and passion with which he engages his material and the bizarrely raucous humor in which the poetry often revels.
Lord Byron’s Foot is the twelfth winner of the annual New Criterion Poetry Prize.
The New Criterion is recognized as one of the foremost contemporary venues for poetry that pays close attention to form. Building upon its commitment to serious poetry,
The New Criterion established this annual prize in 2000.
Trade ReviewGeorge Green’s poems are full of wit, lore, and extraordinary twists. They converse delightfully of cultures high and low, yet with a vision which recognizes in Warhol’s portraits “a frightful vacancy and transience,” and can see in twinkling Sirius “a loose bulb on the drunkard’s porch that flickers.” His constantly amusing discourse has an enriching darkness which transcends the comic. —Richard Wilbur
The poems of George Green, with their breadth of knowledge, their eloquence, their humor, their vitality, all incomparably orchestrated, are astonishing. He is one of the truly outstanding poets at work today. —Mark Strand
George Green is an ingenious poet who brings it all to the table—his erudition, his comic sense, an open heart, and an unerring feel for English prosody. —Billy Collins
Lord Byron’s Foot is worth the price of admission for the title poem alone, but every poem here has its surprises and pleasures. In George Green’s poems, Jimmy Hendrix rubs shoulders with John Wilkes Booth, Pindar, and Maria Callas, to name a few. If this makes Green sound ironic and postmodern, that is misleading. Green treats his readers as though we were as cool, urbane, well-read, smart, and unpretentious as he is. He’s probably wrong, but how can we not be flattered and beguiled?
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A. E. Stallings
